How we make these

The method, the checks, and — the part most sites leave out — what the checks cannot see.

Step-by-step drawing sheet: a cat sitting upright seen from the front, built up over six frames from the complete head — ears, eyes, nose and whiskers — to the curled tail, the body, the front legs and the paws, black outlines on white — Step sequence made by us from a single drawing: each step keeps the lines of the one before it and adds to them.

One drawing, not six

The obvious way to build a six-step tutorial is to make six pictures. We do not, and the reason is worth stating: six separately drawn pictures are six different animals in six different places, and “step 4 contains step 3” would then be a promise nobody had checked. Instead each sheet starts from one finished drawing, and the six frames are derived from it by revealing its closed shapes in order of size. Every step therefore contains the previous step exactly, because it is made of the same lines.

Why the order is what it is

The reveal order is by area: the largest closed shape appears first and the smallest last. That is a property we can measure. It is not a teaching method, and this is the honest limit of the whole site — nothing here reads the picture or knows which line is a whisker and which is an ear. So a sheet may tell you what its frames are. It may not tell you they are the best, the easiest or the correct order to draw in, and you will not find that claim anywhere on this site.

What is checked before a sheet is published

The drawing is black outline on white, with no shading, no grey and no filled areas.
The shapes are closed, so the finished frame can be coloured in.
Every line is thick enough to survive being printed at A4.
The artwork carries no words, letters or numbers anywhere. Every word you see on a sheet — the title, the caption, “Step 1” — is set as real type over the drawing, not baked into it.
Each of the six frames adds a measurable share of the finished drawing, so no step is the previous step printed twice.
The first frame is not most of the drawing already, which is what separates a tutorial from a picture with five afterthoughts.
The PDF is opened and re-read by a second, independent program to confirm the page really is A4 and the paper really is unmarked where nothing was drawn.
Every drawing is looked at by a person before it goes up.

What those checks cannot see

A measurement can tell you a drawing has closed shapes and thick lines. It cannot tell you the drawing is any good, that it is charming, or that it is even the right animal — a cat where a dog was asked for passes every one of the checks above. That is why the last item on the list is a person looking at it, and why sheets do get rejected at that stage: on this launch tranche, one drawing turned out to be three vehicles when the page needed one, and another was an ornate decorated heart when the page needed a plain one. Both passed every automated check and neither was published.

Printing

Each sheet is one A4 page. The paper is never painted — where nothing is drawn, nothing is printed, so the sheets do not empty an ink cartridge. Print at actual size rather than fit-to-page, on ordinary paper. There is nothing on any sheet that needs photo paper, and nothing that needs colour.

Licence — what you may do with these files

The 85 sheets on this site are free to download, print and photocopy for personal use, for a family, and for a classroom or a club, including printing a set for every child in a group. You do not need to ask and there is nothing to pay.

What is not permitted is redistributing the files as your own, selling them or anything made by printing them, or republishing them on another site or in an app. If you want to use a sheet somewhere that is not covered here, the contact page has an address and the answer is usually yes.

Whatever a child draws by copying one of these sheets is theirs, entirely and without condition. That should not need saying, but it is the question people actually ask.